Transforming Rural Communities in China and Beyond PDF Download

Author: Ying Zhu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319113194
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This book represents one of the first attempts by a multidisciplinary research team, encompassing the social sciences, business, architecture and planning, engineering, and finance and economics, to help rural communities discover sustainable and self-reliant paths to development and transformation. The opening chapter outlines the background of the research, its importance in the context of China and other countries, the rationale for choosing the case study communities in rural China, and the composition of the research team. Chapter 2 explores key issues in the role of social entrepreneurship and leadership in rural community development. Chapter 3 analyses a green platform for a pilot transaction of China forest carbon sinks led by the Huadong Forestry Exchange. The fourth chapter examines carbon trade, forestry land rights, and the livelihoods of farmers in rural Chinese communities. Chapter 5 explores alternative energy development in rural Chinese communities, where the poor are often disproportionately dependent on fuel wood and solid biomass, causing environmental degradation, reduced productivity and the decline of income generating opportunities. Chapter 6 examines and tests the proposition that stronger communities will result from ‘connected up’, holistic, synergistic and inclusive planning of services and supporting infrastructure. Chapter 7 analyzes information and communications technology (ICT) based service innovations for supporting rural community enterprises. Chapter 8 highlights key elements of stronger rural communities, drawing together the themes and proposals of preceding chapters and constructing an integrated model. The authors demonstrate that interconnected community enterprises based on clean forest products, forest carbon and ecotourism can be underpinned by local infrastructure enterprises such as renewable energy, water, waste management, ICT and transport, and financial mechanisms like carbon finance, all involving skills development, leadership and social entrepreneurship coupled with corporate and investment partnerships. Such interconnected approaches are expected to generate increased employment and prosperity, improve social livelihoods, and benefit the environment.

Author: Lena Kaufmann
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9048552184
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
How do rural Chinese households deal with the conflicting pressures of migrating into cities to work as well as staying at home to preserve their fields? This is particularly challenging for rice farmers, because paddy fields have to be cultivated continuously to retain their soil quality and value. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and written sources, this book describes farming households' strategic solutions to this predicament. It shows how, in light of rural-urban migration and agro-technological change, they manage to sustain both migration and farming. It innovatively conceives rural households as part of a larger farming community of practice that spans both staying and migrating household members and their material world. Focusing on one exemplary resource - paddy fields - it argues that socio-technical resources are key factors in understanding migration flows and migrant-home relations. Overall, this book provides rare insights into the rural side of migration and farmers' knowledge and agency.

Author: Heather Mair
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800370067
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
This Handbook brings together experts from around the world to reflect critically on the relationship between tourism and rural community development. It first orients the reader in the important conceptual and epistemological foundations of the topic, before moving to consider key concepts and the most significant and salient theoretical and methodological developments in the field.

Author: Scott Rozelle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022674051X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A study of how China’s changing economy may leave its rural communities in the dust and launch a political and economic disaster. As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike. Praise for Invisible China “Stunningly researched.” —TheEconomist, Best Books of the Year (UK) “Invisible China sounds a wake-up call.” —The Strategist “Not to be missed.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) “[Invisible China] provides an extensive coverage of problems for China in the sphere of human capital development . . . the book is rich in content and is not constrained only to China, but provides important parallels with past and present developments in other countries.” —Journal of Chinese Political Science

Author: Lei Sun
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030460991
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book analyses the important role of agribusiness and rural enterprises in economic growth and development. China’s inclusive development of agribusiness and rural enterprises has played a pivotal role in economic growth, sustainable development and poverty reduction. This book analyses how market, price and institution are important factors for China’s inclusive development of agribusiness and rural enterprises. Incentive property rights of farming lands have impacted the allocation efficiency of resources in markets, which contributed to the growth of its agro-industrial development and the families-agribusiness. The technological changes contributed to the agricultural growth in China pre and post economic reform phases. The book introduces the combination development approach (CDA) of agribusiness and rural enterprises. The combination development approach of agribusiness and rural enterprises facilitates developing countries to upgrade into emerging economies and industrial economies. The book presents theoretical perspectives of development economics, and it introduces cutting-edge international development issues, and China’s international economic cooperation on international trade and enterprises development. New technology and information technology bring new business opportunities to smallholder farmers in transitional economies and developing countries to access global value chain in the future.

Author: Xiaowei Wang
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374721254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Author: Jean-François Rousseau
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030593614
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This book conceptualises the ongoing hydropower expansion in Southwest China as a socio-political and transnational project transcending the construction of dams. Chapters in this volume are organised around three sections spanning hydropower and resettlement governance, rural livelihoods, and international relations connected to China’s hydropower expansion. Dam projects of various scales are analysed as infrastructure projects that shape peoples’ livelihoods, the environment, and China’s relations with Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Author: Nelson-Richards
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004670297
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Author: Adenrele Awotona
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443861170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
This volume examines lessons learned in reducing the impact of disasters on communities in China, Japan and other countries world-wide. Asia is the most disaster-prone continent. The 2012 data on natural disasters in 28 Asian countries, released by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Belgian-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters on December 11th, 2012 showed that, from 1950 to 2011, nine out of ten people affected by disasters globally were in Asia; that of the top five disasters that created the most damage in 2012, three were in China; that China led the list of most disasters in 2012; and, that China was the only “multi-hazard”-prone country. Similarly, the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake was the greatest known earthquake ever to have hit Japan and one of the five strongest ever recorded earthquakes in the world since 1900. Subsequently, the Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters at the University of Massachusetts Boston organized a conference in November 2012 to survey the best practices in post-disaster rebuilding efforts in China and Japan. This edited book consists of selected papers from the proceedings of that event and previously invited contributions from leading scholars in post-disaster rebuilding in China, Japan and Namibia.

Author: Wei Zhao
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000786757
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Based on extended fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2019, this book aims to answer a simple question: What is the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China? This question is particularly potent since rural China has experienced rapid and fundamental changes in the twenty-first century under the influences of national policies such as "Building a New Socialist Countryside" enacted in 2006 and "Rural Revitalization" announced in 2018. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, building surveys, archival research, and over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, this book uncovers the meanings of home from rural residents’ perspectives, who belong to a social group that is underrepresented in scholarship and underserved in modern China. In other words, this study empowers rural residents by giving them voice. This book links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: The meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle.